Read The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" Online

Authors: Hugh Hewitt

Tags: #Political Science / American Government / Executive Branch, #Political Science / Political Process / Campaigns & Elections

The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (43 page)

BOOK: The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era"

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They might be right, but if you want to win you will have to assert
with believable conviction that they are wrong and that only you and the changes you urge can keep America safe and its prosperity secure.

To argue for fundamental change you have to make a case that the fundamentals of the world have changed. President Obama has so crippled the country’s position that this will not be a difficult case to make and carry, especially for you.

The GOP will remind people that in the last month of 2014 alone a terrorist struck in Sydney, a massacre of school children took place in Pakistan—a country with about 100 nuclear devices up for grabs—Ebola ravaged West Africa, hundreds of girls were abducted in Nigeria, slaughter and counter-slaughter shook Syria and Iraq, racial tensions peaked in America even as the price of oil plummeted and Russia’s currency and the Euro wobbled on the brink of panicked devaluation with markets teetering like the good old days of 2008, and a series of cyber attacks brought Hollywood to its knees.

In the first six weeks of 2015, the GOP will remind people of the march of Russia across Ukraine, and especially of the brutal assaults of the Islamic State, its beheadings and burning alive of dozens—the “jayvee team” on a rampage, as America stood by impotent, but for some airstrikes to stop them, and headlong on a rush to bless a nuclear Iran even as the president you helped guide in his Iranian policy blesses a near-nuclear Iran.

Three month’s events two years before your election and who knows what President Obama will cause or allow to happen before the election of 2016 unfolds? Who knows what he will do in the interregnum between that vote and his departure? Your husband’s pardon of Marc Rich left no lasting scar but one lasting lesson: After a decent interval nothing is remembered; and everything is, if not forgiven, at least forgotten. You have been on the public stage about as long as Betty White and can carry-off her camp about age with equal aplomb. Laugh off the old scandals. Be suitably outraged about the more recent. Communicate that you won’t forget those who crossed you and yours.

Above all, dismiss as crack-pottery your bigger plans. Gillibrand to
the Supreme Court? “Haven’t thought about that, though she is certainly qualified.” Chelsea in the Senate? “She is master, actually co-pilot, of her own ship. If she decides to serve that way she will certainly have our support, but right now she is totally focused on my granddaughter—she’d better be!—and when she has time this election. I think she also wants to see what the Obama girls and the Bush girls did to the rooms!” Remove the two-term limit and abolish the Electoral College? “A conservative talk show host suggested that? Wonders never cease and both of those ideas have a lot of support in progressive circles and among those who study our Constitution in the modern era.”

Above all you must make this a “first of firsts” elections. And not just about your being a woman.

There have been strong women leaders before, and if Angela Merkel, Maggie Thatcher, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi are not always in your speeches, fire the writers. Own that lineage, not for their ideas, but for their courage. Be sure to pay homages to the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and to Corazon Aquino, the wife who succeeded the assassinated Benigno Aquino, but reserve most of your praise for the big three of Merkel, Thatcher and Meir. They are the leaders who will resonate with the center-right voters you need to woo.

The most important “first of firsts,” though, is that you will be proposing the first major changes in the Constitution since women’s suffrage. Sure, arranging an orderly succession mattered, as did lowering the voting age. But Prohibition was a failed and costly mistake and the income tax amendment was probably unnecessary as the income tax was constitutional to begin with. No, not since the vote for women and before it the abolition of the privilege of selecting senators by state legislators and the Civil War amendments has such a profound change been publicly advanced as ending the Electoral College. You will argue against its deep prejudice against the “one person one vote” equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence. You must turn the bedrock truth “that all men are created equal,” Lincoln’s “electric cord,” against the Republic Party Lincoln founded. (“That is the electric cord in that
Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”—July 10, 1858.)

You must present yourself as did Jefferson and the other signers of 1776—as a revolutionary for equality. Barack Obama represented the end and indeed the completion in fact of the flawed First Founding, a First Founding which was by necessity a moral compromise that brought about, in the words of Harvard’s current president, “A Republic of Suffering” through a horrible civil war but which was, once repaired of this awful original sin, also a country strong enough to defeat fascism, then communism and now Islamism, but only if it continues to grow stronger itself in the cause of the equality of men and women.

Laugh off the attribution to you by me and others of vaster ambitions, by far, than the mere launch of a Second Founding. Mock dynasty in the face of dynasty. As was said in Part III, transparency, properly understood, is the key in which you must speak.

But, finally, let no one doubt that the paybacks are in fact coming—and not of the gentle sort. You will ruin people and sow ashes in their fields. Bill can deliver the message. Others can as well. But it must be delivered.

Abroad, as well as at home. There is no sense in winning the White House to see the country eclipsed by the PRC or devastated by terrorists sponsored by any of a dozen suspects. Follow through on rebuilding the military. And then use it. In these matters keep portraits of Thatcher and Meir close at hand, and of Lincoln. As George W. Bush was fond of saying to Oval Office visitors when pointing first to his chest and then to a portrait of Lincoln hanging on the wall: “41 is closest to my heart but 16 is always on my mind.”

What, after all, is the point of establishing a dynasty if it has nothing to rule, no greatest Republic ever to preserve, even as its Republican veneer thins and thins into something quite different but perhaps necessary.

On that subject, perhaps another book, if you use the lessons of this one.

CHAPTER 45

The Nukes

President Obama has done his worst damage to our most important strategic asset—our nuclear arsenal.

Yes, there are still 450 Minutemen III missiles spread across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Yes, we still have a fleet of 18 Ohio-class submarines (“SSBNs”). 14 of them carrying submarine-launched ballistic missiles (“SLBMs”), four with other capabilities, and all of them together making a total of about 28 “deterrence patrols” annually, each lasting about 70 days. “Deterring what?” the Steelers’ fans but not you might ask. These subs are the strongest part of our nuclear deterrent, but we have always believed in a three-legged deterrent structure, the so-called “nuclear triad.” In addition to the missiles in the ground and under the sea, we still have 94 nuclear-capable heavy bombers, both B-2s and B-52s.

All told there are between 700 and 778 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear capable bombers as of the middle of last year, though experts expect that total number to fall to 700 before President Obama leaves office.

The United States has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992. The new START treaty limits deployed strategic weapons to 1,550.

The annual cost for maintenance of this nuclear deterrent is approximately $16 billion—the most important $16 billion the federal government spends.

The Brookings Institution—your people—estimate that it would
cost a trillion dollars to modernize our nuclear deterrent, to both extend the life span of our aging weapons and to develop new delivery systems like a new SSBN.

Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis, and Marc Quint, who are with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, issued a key study in January 2014, a study which you should carry around with you as a marker of national security seriousness, a cleaver to cut the cord between you and President Obama, the worst president ever when it comes to preserving and protecting America’s national security.

“It is unclear how long the nation’s nuclear weapon program can defy budgetary gravity,” the Martin Center report concluded.

“Because there is no stand-alone life cycle budget for these programs, the administration and Congress are now only beginning to recognize the full scale of the investments being contemplated and have not yet made a public case for this level of commitment,” it adds.

“The result may well be budget chaos,” it continue, and “[i]n the worst case, an attempt to simultaneously rebuild all three legs of the strategic triad” could “imperil either the ICBM force or the nuclear mission for the follow-on bomber.” The authors also noted that the Ohio-class SSBNs are scheduled to begin retiring in 2027, at a rate of one per year through 2042, and that procurement of a new nuclear weapon carrying submarine—the “SSBN(X)”—has already been delayed until 2021 “for costs and other reasons.”

“As a result, the Navy now plans to operate fewer than twelve boats for more than a decade from 2029-41, dropping to 10 deployed boats for the majority of that period.”

The report is rich in other alarming details, and you should spend hours with it, soaking in those details, displaying a command of them, highlighting again that “both Presidents Bush and Obama have utterly failed to preserve our strategic defenses even as strategic threats arise again in Russia and gather strength in the PRC and other countries quest to deploy them.”

JFK ran on a “missile gap,” and so should you, but this time the gap is real and primarily though not exclusively the consequences of actions by a president of your own party.

Madame Secretary, as the last chapter noted, what is the point of a dynasty and a Second Founding and a “Second Founding” if that dynasty and its founding fades almost immediately because of a refusal to take care of the most important assets of national power?

When you campaign, if you speak clearly on this issue, you will splinter the GOP and draw the serious people to you if they believe you are sincere. Once elected, demand—demand—the money for the “Clinton-class SSBN(X) submarines” (you can say they are named for Bill but you will build them and history will record that) and accomplish the laying of the cornerstones of the country’s security and your legacy all at once.

This, the last chapter, is as straightforward as a nuclear bomb, and I hope as as bright. If you don’t rebuild our nuclear deterrent—or if the Republican who beats you doesn’t do this—it is all for naught anyway. The world has always respected the legions or their equivalent. If you want to be a Queen, you have to have the power to stay on the throne.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks and continuous expressions of public appreciation to many people but especially Kate Harston, who edited this book and Craig Wiley who, as my agent, found it a home; Lynne Chapman who kept it organized and Snow Philip who proofed it; and, of course, the Fetching Mrs. Hewitt who encouraged it, as she did me, every day of its making.

In my last book before this one,
The Happiest Life
, I included both a chapter on “Friendship” and a lengthy set of genuine, deeply-felt acknowledgements for the joy in my life, to which I refer the genuinely interested reader, and from which I nevertheless reproduce all the people who make the radio show possible, beginning with Ed Atsinger and Stu Epperson, Dave Santrella, Greg Anderson, Phil Boyce, Tom Tradup, Russ Hauth and 100+ GMs and PDs, plus the A-team of broadcast, in order of their appearance in my radio life, Duane Patterson, Anthony Ochoa, Adam Ramsey, Russ Shubin, Danielle Hitchens, Marlon Bateman, Daniel Roberts, Tony J. Black, C.J. Morton and Dylan Kasperowitz. Who would have thought a voice over the air would require so many talents?

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